The transmission of color television signals (e.g. NTSC signals) over standard communication channels of the North American hierarchy, e.g. DS3 or 45 Mb/s, is currently accomplished using some form of digital encoding mechanism through which the signal of interest is digitized and encoded (including data compression) for transmission to a receiver site. At the receiver site, the encoded signal is decoded (expanded) and converted into the analog format of the original signal, thereby deriving a `reconstructed` version of the original video signal. Because the nominal 4.2 MHz bandwidth of composite NTSC color signals is an industry standard, nonvariable quantity, and given the fact that the digital encoding mechanism must adhere to the Nyquist criteria of band limiting the sampled signal to no more than half the sampling frequency (which, in the case of NTSC signals, must be at least 8.4 MHz) and taking into account the additional communication overhead bits that are included in a frame of data, and the available transmission capacity of a DS3 facility being 44.736 Mb/s, then it can be seen that the encoding resolution is typically limited to no more than four bits per sample for codes employing a fixed number of bits per encoded sample. Moreover, the choice of a four bit resolution encoding scheme is underscored by the fact that it permits the use of a sampling clock that is compatible with the format of NTSC color signals and permits easily realizable antialiasing and reconstruction filters. Because of the limitation of sixteen code words for fourbits per sample encoding schemes, typical four bit encoders must compromise either the signal-to-noise ratio or the fidelity of difficult to encode objects, such as edges.